Probably the best way to illustrate this is by telling you about the mistakes I made when I started my accounting firm, back in 1996. For the first two and a half years, even though I grew very quickly, I had no idea about pricing. This meant, for example, that although I did a lot of marketing and saw a lot of potential clients, often impressing the heck out of them with my background in tax planning and all the ideas I came up with, at the end of the meeting, having done all the hard work, I’d blow it. They'd say, “Mark, this sounds brilliant. We want to work with you. How much will it cost?” And...

In a recent post I shared a new business model for the modern accountant: running an online mentoring programme[HP1] . That’s to say, working with a group of business owners every month to help them improve their business. Now, I’d like to share seven ways you can attract more clients – both current and prospective – to join your group.

Unfortunately, because my business is online and I don’t have regular face-to-face meetings with clients, I can't use this technique. But, if you do have meetings, then make sure you always have an item on your agenda when you can talk about your online mentoring group. (If you don’t use an agenda for meetings, then you should!)

#2: Social media

Social media is so, so powerful. You absolutely should be using it. You should be joining groups of business owners –...

As Cloud accounting continues to reduce the time spent on bookkeeping and year-end, I’m sure you’ve already realised that as modern accounting professionals we need to find new ways of adding value to what we do.

One great way is to run an online mentoring group. Basically, once a month you get a group of around ten of your best current or prospective clients together online for 60 to 90 minutes, and teach them how to improve their businesses.

Although the benefits are multiple, perhaps the biggest is leverage. As accountants and bookkeepers, historically we’ve worked with clients on a one-to-one basis, which is limited by how much time we have. But online mentoring groups allow us to work with lots of people at once, generating much greater revenue in the process.

As the Amazon number-one best-selling author of “Effective Pricing for Accountants”, I’d like to talk about why you should always reveal your most expensive solution first. A lot of research has been done in this area and there are a number of ideas we can learn from it to improve our pricing strategy and income.

Create a high reference price – and watch clients spend more

One key idea is top-down pricing. Basically, it means we should always talk to clients about our most expensive option first because it creates a reference price, or an anchor. And what the research has found is that when we talk about the most expensive option first, people end up spending more money than if we’d revealed the cheapest first.

A related idea that I also teach is the price-order effect, and what this says is that you should reveal your prices in a certain order. Sometimes we might have a verbal conversation...

I’d like to share with you why you should avoid coupling at all costs.

So what does coupling mean? To explain, I’ll need to refer to some research done in 1998 by Prelec and Loewenstein, two behavioural economists. Here are their exact words on what they learned from their study: "Coupling refers to the degree to which consumption calls to mind thoughts of payment and vice versa. Some financing methods, such as credit cards, tend to weaken coupling. Whereas others, such as cash payments, produce much tighter coupling. Sometimes this is referred to as saliency. What it means is that if we can change the way that we take money from the clients, we can reduce the association of payment pain."

Uber leads the way

I can give you a great example of how this works in practice by taking a look at the taxicab industry. I’m sure you’re aware of how it’s been revolutionised in the last...

How verisimilitude – the appearance of truth – can improve your pricing

Today I’d like you to think about why you should use verisimilitude – the appearance of truth – in your pricing. To help, I’ll first need to tell you a little about the research behind it, and then I’ll explain how you can apply what you’ve learned to reap the rewards in your own business.

Rounded prices rely on emotions, non-rounded on cognition

In 2015, Wadhwa and Zhang – two Assistant Professors of Marketing – wrote: "Because rounded numbers are more fluently processed, rounded prices encourage reliance on feelings. In contrast, because non-rounded numbers are disfluently processed, non-rounded prices encourage reliance on cognition." Theirs was the first research that examined the impact of rounded prices on people’s decision to buy a product – and more specifically that was based on whether the decision was driven by feelings or by...

In this post I’d like to share something you must never, ever do: please, please, please don't reveal your headline price. As the Amazon number-one best-selling author of “Effective Pricing for Accountants”, I can assure you it’s an incredibly powerful concept that will get you much, much higher prices with much less price resistance too.

So, what is your headline price?

Very simply, your headline price is the total price. I can probably best explain the concept by telling you about an experiment done some years ago by Ryan Deis, one of the world's leading Internet marketers.

Ryan decided to sell one of his products at $197 and found he sold 340, which generated him just over $66,000. Not a bad result, but it’s what happened next that’s really interesting. He decided to find out what would happen if, rather than $197, he asked for two payments of $97. (It’s not quite the same price but,...

As the Amazon number-one best-selling author of “Effective Pricing for Accountants” I’d like to share how using a concept called phonetic simplification will get you better prices and results.

One of the things we’re just starting to understand is how irrational the human brain is. And how, once we understand that, we can use it to our advantage. (Some of you may already know Dan Ariely’s book “Predictably Irrational”?)

One key insight I want to share with you today was revealed in July 2012, when Coulter, Choi and Monroe published a research paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology called “Comma N' cents in pricing: The effects of auditory representation in coding on price magnitude perceptions”.

The more syllables in a price – the higher it seems

In essence what the authors found was what they describe as “phonetic simplification”. In other...

This is a principle I refer to as left digit management. And it’s one that I believe can be even more powerful than the power of 9 – a commonly used price psychology method.

In the power of 9 you should always consider using a price that ends in a 9 because it will encourage more conversions. So instead of using £390 or $390 as a price for example you use £389 or $389.

It may only be a pound or dollar difference but the impact of the power of 9 means that more people will buy.

The power of the first digit

Apply a similar principle to the first digit however, and the impact is even more powerful. Say in this instance the price is £400 (or $400). Test it at £399 (or $399) and again – although it’s only a pound or a dollar difference the perception is an even greater difference than the previous example and therefore more clients are likely to convert.

Next time have a quick scan of the receipt. How many of the prices of the things that you bought end in 9? Chances are, a vast majority.

Why?

Because 9 is a hugely powerful number when it comes to pricing and price psychology. There have been numerous studies into its power but one of my favourites involves three experiments carried out by Anderson and Simester in their research paper “The Effects of $9 Price Endings on Retail Sales”.

One of those experiments saw them testing an item in a catalogue at three different price points to see how the price affected conversions.

The results will surprise you.

How a mid-price option proved the most popular

At $34 they sold 16 unitsAt $39 they sold 21 unitsAt $44 they told 17 units

Look again.

The cheapest did not sell the most. The most expensive did not sell the least. In fact the price point that converted best...